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<TITLE>Reasoning About Knowledge</TITLE>
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<H1>Reasoning About Knowledge (COM S 676): <BR>
Course Description</H1>
 
 
Reasoning about knowledge -- particularly the knowledge of agents who
reason about the world and each other's knowledge -- was once the
exclusive province of philosophers and puzzle solvers.  More recently,
this type of reasoning has been shown to play a key role in a
surprising number of contexts, from understanding conversations to the
analysis of distributed computer algorithms.<P>
 
This course provides a general
discussion of approaches to reasoning about knowledge and its
applications to distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and game
theory.  We'll start by examining
 the well-known ``muddy
children puzzle'', which demonstrates
the subtleties of reasoning about
knowledge of a group.  We then consider a simple yet powerful
formal semantic model for knowledge and a language for reasoning about
knowledge whose underlying idea is that of ``possible worlds''.  The
rest of the course develops the model and show how it can be used to
ascribe knowledge to agents in multi-agent systems.  This allows us to
better understand notions such as coordination and agreement.  The
definitions lead naturally to a notion of knowledge-based programs, a
high-level tool for designing and analyzing systems.<P>
 
The course follows closely the material in
the book <!WA6><!WA6><!WA6><!WA6><!WA6><!WA6><!WA6><!WA6><A HREF="http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/People/halpern/abstract.html#book2">Reasoning About Knowledge</A>,
which actually was inspired by early versions of the course.

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